But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.
“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”
Bolding mine, and via Patterico’s Pontifications, who is laughing as hard over this as I am. Please also note that being for a public option is now being seen as being a non-mainstream position by the White House culture itself: the tone-deafness exhibited there is staggering, particularly since it was guaranteed that the WaPo would run with that. Which suggests one of two alternatives: either the White House is going to drop the public option, or the White House has precisely zero message discipline.
Or both, I suppose.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.